Antiquarian and Classic Book Reviews
On the surface, he’s travelling with his attorney and a trunk full of drugs in order to document a racing event and later on to attend a convention for law enforcement on drugs and drug culture. Below the surface, it’s a journey to figure out the purpose of journalism, idealism, and its role in the shifting tide of American culture. This is a review of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Chapters, paragraphs, sentences, and words flow into each other, but at the same time there are images and concepts that stand out and become touchstones for the work as a whole. This is a review of Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy.
A critique of journalism and the complex politics and corruption present in the newspaper industry in Paris at the turn of the last century, this is a review of Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami.
It’s a fast-paced narrative that critics and readers alike agree has literary merit. The debate comes from the author’s proclamation of being perfectly factual. This is a review of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.
What follows is a light-hearted escapade through the tropes and clichés of rural melodramas complete with a happy ending and a lot of jokes at the expense of 1930s high society and their ideas about farming and the poorer classes. This is a review of Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm.
The real shining piece of this book is the ghost and the setting. The whole world of the opera house comes alive as the ghost wrecks havoc and extracts vengeance. This is a review of Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (Le Fantôme de l’Opéra).
Reading correspondence is not quite the same as reading a novel, obviously, but it can be just as valuable when it comes to understanding a writer, their work, literature of the period, or the general customs of the time period. Writers writing about writing can be a very enlightening read. This is a review of Letters to a Young Poet.
This week I’ve decided to write a double review since both books are by the same authors and both are at least semi-autobiographical. This is a review of two books about the Fitzgeralds: This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned.
I had read some of Murdoch’s work previously, but I admit that I wanted this set because the book design was gorgeous from the covers to the selection of typeface and the ratio of text to margins. This is a review of Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea.
These two novels were written in 1942, before their author was arrested by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz where she died of typhoid. The novels and notes were kept in a suitcase and taken by her daughter when she fled from the Nazis during the war. After that, the suitcase remained unopened until 1998. This is a review of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française.
